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Ex-Fat for my external HD, working on a new Mac, with Premiere?
We’ve been working with a PC, but recently got a new Mac system for video editing. It is a brand new Mac with the latest version of premiere loaded into it.
My question is, if we haven’t had the chance to change our hard drives to the mac format, can I still edit from the drives that are in EX-Fat or Fat 32 formats?
(The reason we were using these formats was for PC – Mac file compatibility and transferring.)
I have read a number of discussions on this from different places around the web prior to today. I seem to remember something about FAT formats not being set up to really handle the processing needs of video editing. As of today all the discussions I can find seem to be pretty old (2009 and earlier).
Thanks! I appreciate updated advice!
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5 Replies
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Ex-Fat, FAT-32 and NTFS format drives are all readable in the newer Mac OS X operating systems.
NTFS is not writable by OS X without 3rd party software.
FAT-32 will have the typical file size limitations.
Ex-Fat is a good option for both PC and Windows.Your greatest bottleneck / potential problem is with the connection interface.
USB 2 is a poor interface for HD video files. It will work, but you will have wait times.What is the connection to your storage?
David Kuhnen
BVK-Milwaukee
Video Editor/Engineer -
Thank you, David!
Currently, our primary Hard Drive takes E-Sata to USB 3.0 to the computer
Other back-up drives are G-tech, so they have firewire 800.Is Ex-Fat stable enough for 4tb of media storage and video editing?
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“…takes E-Sata to USB 3.0 to the computer”
So you’re converting eSata to USB3?“…Firewire 800” now I have to ask what model Mac you’re using. MacPro (tower) does not currently have USB3, iMac and MacBook do not have Firewire, although the G-Tech drives typically have multiple connection types.
Overall, since you’re not trying to use USB2 for day-to-day editing, you’re good.
The file system of the hard drive (i.e. Ex-Fat) has little to do with stability, it primarily only affects compatibility between operating systems. Ex-Fat on a quality hard drive will be very stable and have similar performance to a ‘native’ (NTFS for Windows, HFS+ for Mac) file system.
David Kuhnen
BVK-Milwaukee
Video Editor/Engineer -
It is a Mac tower.
The current primary hard drive is seagate. It was ordered by someone else for the PC as a workstation, but we’ve been having compatibility issues with transferring assets to other Mac stations, so we got a Mac editing station. (i think we also needed to give the PC back to it’s original purpose.)
Once everything is set up the Seagate won’t be a primary drive, the g-tech drives will.
I hope that clarifies things a bit. Thanks for letting me pick your brain.
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Hey Kim –
I have used exfat for editing drives before. I have found it to be slightly less stable then NTFS on Windows or HFS on mac. Slightly. Like, if you work with any drive long enough, it will get corrupt. I found that the exfat architecture was just slightly less reliable. I still read and wrote to the drive for 8+ months before anything happened.
A word of advice, though: because of some quirk, macs don’t like exfat volumes created on PCs under certain circumstances. Save yourself some headache and just create the volumes on the mac.
R
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